Sometimes science takes you in strange directions. I study how human brains processes music, but last year I found myself in a living room in suburban Indiana, dancing with a sulphur-crested cockatoo named Snowball.

I had been captivated by his YouTube debut, where he seemed to really be dancing to the beat of human music.

The ability to synchronize movements to a musical beat was long thought to be uniquely human, but Snowball’s dancing suggested otherwise. Fortunately I was able to collaborate with his owners and conduct a controlled study, showing that he really did sense a beat and move in time with it, even when no humans were dancing with him. Crucially, when we slowed down or sped up his favorite song (“Everybody”, by the Back Street Boys), he spontaneously adjusted his dance tempo accordingly, just as a human would.

This discovery (recently published in Current Biology) has implications for debates over the evolution of human music, and has opened my mind to the complexity of music perception by nonhuman animals.

Our work with Snowball appears in the PBS documentary “The Music Instinct“, which airs on June 24th.